The Internet of Things (IoT) envisions a fully networked world with billions of interconnected devices. This will lead to a dramatic paradigm shift in the networking world, since Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications will be several orders of magnitude greater than the Human-to-Human or Human-to-Machine communications which is dominating today.
In this scenario, it would often be convenient for a device to be able to locate and communicate with its physically neighbouring devices. In addition, due to the sheer number of devices, self-properties (self-configuration, self-healing, self-management etc.) will be needed.
In this sense, it is convenient to modify the global communication domain (agnostic to location) to provide more localized information. For instance, mapping databases to geographical areas would lower the burden of maintaining global databases. Databases such as distributed hash tables (DHTs), publish-subscribe (pub/sub) networks and location-based services already exist separately and are known.
GaiaSup (http://gaiasup.com) provides an engine to “help developers to easily build location-based services (LBS) or geo/spatial applications” using pub/sub for spatial data. GaiaSup aggregates the location of multiple devices, in order to create a better positioning system.
The thesis “A distributed pub-sub based middleware service for configuring multicast areas in a sensor network” by Vijay Srinivasan dated May 10, 2005, University of Virginia (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/˜vs8h/AMcast.pdf) deals with distribution and pub/sub in sensor networks. The paper is focused on local, homogeneous, mostly mica2 motes, sensor networks. The thesis uses pub/sub within the sensor network and relative X,Y coordinates for the devices.